Chapter 4
Four
Tate
“C’mon, pal. Come on, Cornbread. Ready to go home, boy?” Kellan slapped his leg in invitation. The dog bounded toward him, tail ticking like a joyful metronome, because he’d follow Kellan anywhere. His ride or die. As Kellan had always been mine.
I really hoped I hadn’t fucked that up with this engagement fiasco.
Goodnights were said to the Foxes, and we loaded up into my truck.
Kellan still hadn’t been by his place to pick his up yet.
We were headed back to my place to gather up Cornbread’s stuff so he could actually go home.
And that meant that finally there was nothing and no one standing between me and my confession.
The burger and potato salad I’d managed to choke down at the MacAvoy’s cookout threatened to come back up.
Absolutely nothing today had gone the way I expected or wanted.
I mean, I had expected Kellan would play along with the whole thing.
But I hadn’t anticipated he’d throw himself into this with so much… gusto.
For just a moment, my brain shot back to that parking lot, to that kiss.
God, that kiss had knocked me sideways. I’d planned on a quick peck, just enough to sell the lie to everyone watching.
Instead, the moment our lips touched, everything changed.
His hands had found my waist, pulling me closer.
His mouth moved against mine with a heat that had my toes curling in my boots.
The tenderness and hunger in that kiss caught me completely off guard.
Kellan Fox wasn’t supposed to kiss like that.
He was my best friend, my business partner, the guy who’d spent countless hours debating the merits of different fertilizers with me.
The guy who thought cargo shorts were acceptable business attire.
But there’d been nothing friendly about the way his fingers had traced up my spine. Nothing casual about how his breath caught when I’d gripped his shoulders. And absolutely nothing platonic about how he’d deepened that kiss until I forgot we had an audience.
Shit, was it hot in here?
Nothing after that had gone like I’d wanted either.
Instead of being able to pull him aside immediately, it had been hours.
More and more people had seen the two of us together, with Kellan acting like the doting fiancé.
More lies. More faking. He didn’t need this.
Not after coming off a year’s deployment. Not ever.
Guilt hung over me like a lead cloud.
“You okay over there?” Kellan’s voice cut through my thoughts.
I darted a glance his way. He lounged in the passenger seat, one arm propped against the window, watching me with those sharp eyes that always saw too much. Cornbread’s head rested on his shoulder from the backseat.
“I’m sorry. About all of this.”
He reached out and laid a hand briefly on my thigh. “It’s okay. I’m not upset.”
The touch burned through my jeans, derailing whatever I’d been about to say. Had he gotten so into his role that he forgot we didn’t do shit like this?
“How…” I swallowed and tried again. “How can you not be upset that everyone in town—including our friends and family—think that we’re engaged?” And that they were all acting like this was an obvious outcome for the two of us. That might have been the weirdest part of the whole thing.
“We’ll figure it out.”
Easy for him to say.
I took a deep breath, ready to launch into the whole thing.
“Wait.”
I glanced back at him. “What?”
“It’s literally five minutes to your house. I suspect the story is gonna go better with alcohol. You have not been imbibing, so maybe a beer would make this go down a little better.”
He wasn’t wrong.
“Yeah, okay.”
That five minutes somehow passed like both seconds and years.
At my place, I sprang Cornbread from the backseat.
He raced ahead of us, dancing in front of the door.
Courtesy of the cookout, he was getting his own dinner late.
I let us all inside, and the dog made a beeline for the kitchen.
Signs of him were everywhere, from the big squishy bed in the living room to the dozen toys scattered over the floor and the bowls in the corner of the kitchen. He bounced in front of the latter.
“I know. I know. You’re hungry. I’m coming.”
The idea that he’d be leaving tonight filled me with an odd sort of grief.
I’d gotten so attached to having him in my house.
A big warm presence at the foot of my bed.
Not that I was quite ready to admit to Kellan that I’d shamelessly spoiled his pup beyond belief while he’d been gone.
In the grand scheme of admissions, that was a big nothingburger.
While I filled his bowl with kibble and a few spoonfuls of the soft food with gravy that he loved, Kellan pulled a couple of beers from my fridge.
He popped the tops and sprawled at the table, stretching out those long legs still clad in his fatigues.
He used one booted foot to shove out the adjacent chair. “Sit.”
I followed the order, resisting the urge to hunch my shoulders.
He tipped back the bottle, closing his eyes with a sigh. “This. This right here.”
“The beer?” I asked, faintly baffled.
“More specifically, a beer with you at the end of the day. This is what I thought about these past few months. The thing I missed. Cracking a couple open or heading to Doc Holliday’s and talking.
” Those blue eyes focused on mine, flashing with humor.
“I didn’t quite imagine we’d be talking about our engagement, though. ”
I winced and began picking at the label on my own bottle.
“You’ve been trying to get me alone to talk to me about this all day. Now’s your chance.” And he simply waited in that calm, patient, ready-for-anything Kellan way.
I’d thought and thought and thought about how to tell this story. Nothing seemed good or right. So I started logically at the beginning.
“I heard about a feature that Southeastern Landscape Design Digest was planning on couple-run businesses. I thought the publicity would be good for ours. Things have been—well, not bad—but the economy is in a rough place, and folks have less money to spend on this kind of thing. I thought if Mountain Laurel got featured, that it would just be some good publicity. I mean, I know we’re not a couple like that, but we’re sort of a couple, and I thought that if we got chosen, I could just be good and vague about that in the interview.
So I applied on a whim. Then I did end up getting contacted and interviewed, and the author made some assumptions, which were understandable based on the brief for the article itself.
But, I mean, it’s a landscape architecture magazine.
I thought nobody from Huckleberry Creek would ever hear about it. ”
“Except somebody did.”
Miserable, I nodded. “Yeah. Then the local paper picked it up and embellished some details without asking me. They were the ones who started the engagement rumor, and it just picked up steam, and I had no idea how to stop this runaway train without looking bad. I thought—well, I guess I thought you could help me figure out how to get out of it when you got back because you were always the brains behind getting us out of scrapes growing up.” I forced myself to meet his gaze.
“I’m so sorry this got sprung on you like this.
I have no idea how we’re going to fix it in a way that makes everybody not hate me for lying or does damage to the very business I was trying to help. ”
He sipped his beer, watching, absorbing, while I agonized over every second that ticked by without a reply.
This was one of those occasions when I absolutely despised his military training, because he could so easily hide behind that flat soldier mask, and I couldn’t read him.
I desperately needed to know that I hadn’t ruined our friendship.
“That is something of a pickle,” he finally conceded.
“A pickle,” I repeated, faintly incredulous. Was that really all he had to say?
He nodded. Sipped again. “Obviously, we have to continue the ruse until we figure it out. We’re a happily engaged couple, and I just got home from a year-long deployment. Everybody is gonna expect us to be joined at the hip, so I guess I’m moving in.”
I gaped at him. Whatever I’d expected him to say, it wasn’t this. “I’m sorry… what?”
Kellan jerked a shoulder. “Well, you could move in with me, but Cornbread’s stuff is already here, and I have less stuff to move. Just clothes and things. And I feel like your place is more comfortable.” He shoved up from the table.
The runaway train I’d been chasing for the past few weeks was somehow picking up steam and moving even faster. I shot to my feet. “That’s not what I… Kellan, what are you—”
His big hands closed over my shoulders and pulled me in for a hug. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure all this out.”
How could he do that? Say it in such a way that I actually believed that somehow everything was all going to turn out okay?
I didn’t see how that was remotely possible under the circumstances, but maybe he was right.
With a little more time to absorb and think about it, maybe he’d come up with some sort of genius master plan.
I squeezed him back, relieved beyond belief not to be in this on my own anymore. “Well, then I guess we should go get your stuff.”